King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  So I led my shadow back across the bridge to a Market Street parking garage and then on a leisurely stroll that took us to the cosmetics and menswear sections of a chain department store. And finally, to a shop that sold stationery and signs such as “For Rent” and “Beware of Dog.”

  He didn’t come inside either time. But I didn’t mind.

  He wasn’t hard to shop for.

  San Francisco’s skyline used to be the marvel of the Western world.

  Port cities like Chicago and Los Angeles might have ten times its size; others, like Tokyo and Hong Kong, might show more hustle. But San Francisco’s peculiar marriage of hilly terrain and architectural elegance made it a place of healing for anyone capable of honest response to beauty. A friend of mine bought a tall, thin house on Russian Hill a few years ago and bribed three separate building inspectors to let him saw away an entire wall and fill the opening with plate glass, just to give him a reason to come home at night.

  Worked like a charm.

  But time is the great assassin of pride, and at length the envious had their day. The trouble began—like so many acts of architectural vandalism—in Chicago, where engineers backed by an insurance company were permitted to erect the world’s largest and least attractive oil derrick, paint it black, and rent out office space.

  Nobody paid much attention at the time.

  Chicago had always been ugly.

  Disorders not checked in their earliest stages, however, always seem to spread, and real trouble was in the planning stages even before the repellent rookery’s dark-tinted window glass was in place. And this time it was in a place where real damage could be done.

  Yet another insurance company somehow persuaded the city of San Francisco to issue it a permit for a building intended to take the Chicago uglification to its illogical limit. A true pyramid, the edifice that finally reared itself above the morning fog of the bay was a kind of slant-walled stiletto, equipped with jug ears near the top in what might or might not have been an effort to give the impression that the whole megalomaniacal monstrosity was about to launch itself into space—as it surely would have done if mass prayer were anything like as effective as it has sometimes been advertised to be.

  About the only thing the builders didn’t do was paint it black.

  Even high-tech terrorism seems to have its limits.

  The sides glistened smooth and snow-blinding white in the early afternoon sun as we passed in single file through a street-level entryway.

  I didn’t know the building well, and the main lobby had changed a bit since my one and only previous visit. But tall buildings that offer a view from their upper reaches tend to be pretty much the same in certain respects, and the team that had designed this one had done nothing to break the mold.

  A posh cocktail lounge-cum-hidey-hole near the main elevator bank was practically made to order.

  One entrance on the street.

  The other in the lobby.

  I went in and sat down to wait, keeping my eyes on the smoky dimness of the back-bar mirror.

  My man came through the door thirty seconds after I was settled in my chair—and found himself effectively trapped. No way to watch both doors from outside; no way to watch from inside without sitting in one of the booths. And no way to do that without ordering a drink.

  He had one option, of course. From where I was seated I could see the corner of a pay telephone peeping from the doorway of the rest room alcove. If my erstwhile companion had friends and allies in the vicinity, he could call for backup. That would force me to change tactics.

  But he didn’t, even after the first hour of our stay in the bar when hydraulic pressure finally drove him out of the booth.

  He had made a basic error in the kind of waiting game he was trying to play.

  Needing some excuse to occupy the only space where he could keep me in sight, he had ordered a glass of beer. Which let me know he wasn’t as experienced as I’d thought. I was nursing a vodka-rocks at the bar, being careful not to meet his eye in the mirror, and the bartender paid me no mind. Early afternoon lushes are a law unto themselves; serve them whatever they want and leave them alone unless you want to hear the sad story of their lives. Popular myth and superstition notwithstanding, the wise and sympathetic bartender who will act as a cut-rate psychoanalyst and marriage counselor, in addition to pouring drinks and cutting up fruit and punching the cash register and washing the glasses and fending off the mooches, is an endangered species—one that started to scarce out about the time cars lost their running boards.

  The early-afternoon beer customer, however, is fair game.

  Especially in a booth. Bartenders are in a position to put up with a certain amount of nonsense. They will get paid for the shift whether anyone sits down at the plank or not. But the cocktail waitress is breaking her arches for nothing unless the booth and table trade can be encouraged, so the inquiries about future need tend to become both pointed and frequent as time goes by. Especially if the customer is sticking to beer.

  My man drank five tall amber glassfuls during the first hour of his vigil and six the next, while I swallowed only two understrength helpings of vodka over ice—and put Master Masuda’s latest course of instruction to the test.

  Alcohol is not strychnine. But it is certainly a poison, one that can be deadly in sufficient quantity and concentration, and dealing with it required me to apply ogawa techniques I knew only in principle. Alcohol can and will interact with a number of chemicals readily available in the body, but the trouble is, most such combinations produce substances that are even more toxic than the alcohol itself. The main effort, then, is first to limit the amount taken in and then to neutralize such effects as cerebral edema and vascular engorgement. Saline solutions are effective for the edema; I manufactured the salt water and directed it—clumsily, I’m sure—to what seemed the most likely spot, while breathing as deeply as possible without drawing attention to myself. And used the excess oxygen to treat respiratory depression while forcing the stomach to turn out small quantities of glucose for the inevitable acidosis.

  Easy enough for Master Masuda. But he wasn’t there to offer advice and encouragement and I also lacked the confidence of long and successful practice, so traces of the vodka kept filtering through as the hours passed.

  My shadow, however, was in real trouble.

  The first two or three beers of the day go down easily for most people, and they are deceptive. The chemical nature of the substance in which the alcohol is suspended makes it a bit slower getting into the bloodstream than might otherwise be the case. But once the process is established, the carbon dioxide content of the brew sets up a kind of express-loading process in the system, partially bypassing kidney functions and distending the bladder. My shadow held out for more than an hour before his first visit to the rest room, and when he came out he was in a hurry—with a quick glance toward the bar to make sure I hadn’t seized the opportunity to elude him.

  His second visit came after a far shorter period, and by the time slanting sunlight finally found its way around the edges of the door leading to the street, he was making the trip every ten minutes or so. Which meant he was ready for the next step.

  I signaled to the bartender, paid the tab plus a tip of the right size to make sure I wouldn’t be remembered, and headed for the door leading to the elevators.

  My shadow had been paying for his orders as they arrived, so he was able to get out the door not far behind me. But the beer had taken its toll. His eyes blinked against the sudden explosion of light, and it took him just a split second too long to figure out which way I had gone.

  And then he had a new problem.

  I was standing with two other people, waiting for one of the two elevators to the observation deck. The lifts were specials intended for the tourist trade and not programmed to pick up or discharge passengers on lower floors, so he had the option of staying right where he was and waiting for me to come back, an idea with obvious merit for a m
an who hopes to remain anonymous.

  If he did that, though, I might make unseen contact with someone waiting above, or even walk down a floor from the observation deck to catch one of the locals en route to an office in the building. It was a judgment call—and I was counting on his judgment being just far enough off to make him decide on a compromise.

  The elevator arrived while he was still trying to figure it out, and he was still standing just outside the lounge door when I got in and turned around to face front.

  There was even a moment when I thought I’d guessed wrong.

  But no.

  The automatic doors hesitated, waiting for possible stragglers, and by the time they finally closed he had made up his mind to follow me and was moving toward the other tower elevator.

  I relaxed to enjoy the ride.

  It was as swift as I had hoped, and I led the way out the door when we arrived at the observation level.

  The two people who had come up with me moved immediately in the direction of the view—which is matchless, since it is now the only one in town where you don’t get the point—but I turned in the opposite direction.

  There were four stalls in the men’s room, but they were empty and I found myself humming a little song as I set about checking the three items I had bought earlier in the day.

  A hook in one of the stalls seemed made to order for the cheap black plastic raincoat.

  I took out the little printed sign that I had bought and tilted it face down against the mirror. And thought about setting out the brand-new lipstick beside it but put that into my coat pocket instead. No sense tempting fate.

  I took my prosthetic right eye out of its socket and settled down just inside the door to wait.

  There were a lot of variables and a lot of things that could have gone wrong. But I was on a roll.

  The rest rooms were wedged into the service core next to the elevators, and I started playing a prepared script in my head as soon as I heard the next car arrive:

  —Doors open.

  —A man emerges, blinks in the direction of the view, and blinks again to make sure the person he wants isn’t standing there.

  —Looks around, sees a doorway opposite marked Stairway.

  —Moves toward it.

  —Hesitates.

  —Decides to check out the rest rooms before committing himself to what could be a long descending climb.

  —Opens the one marked Men.

  —Stands transfixed, eyes slightly crossed, systems momentarily overloaded by the unblinking stare of a single lidless eyeball suspended less than a foot from his nose . . .

  Paralysis didn’t last long, of course.

  But I hadn’t thought it would, and a split second would have been more than enough.

  The idea had grown out of my conversation with Suleiman. Saiminjutsu is one of the more arcane weapons of the ninja, a peculiarly potent form of hypnotism, and one that requires considerable training and mental preparation on the part of the user. Using it now was chancy; I’d had the training but not the time and solitude needed to give myself the quiet central core that is generally considered indispensable.

  Master Masuda’s tutelage, however, had included several alternative forms, slightly less effective and of shorter duration, for use in emergency.

  Dulling of the subject’s senses by chemical means was the first step in the one I had selected.

  Giving him a close-up of the glass eyeball was step two; the shock could be expected to leave a hole in the psychic defenses that are common to all sentient life forms. And it was all I needed.

  A moment later I was able to move the eyeball out of his visual range while he remained in stasis, gazing fixedly at the extended middle and index fingers of my left hand.

  I led him farther inside and used the little cardboard sign to block the door with its printed Out of Order message.

  Time was the one factor I couldn’t be sure of, and I had to rush him through the process of removing his shoes, socks, coat, tie, shirt, and trousers, allowing him to hang them neatly over the partition wall as he seemed to want to do. Here was a man who’d had a strict mama.

  Getting him to hold still while I used the lipstick to print a message on his chest was a little harder.

  He didn’t seem to mind the scent—even smiled a little as I screwed the business end up into position—but he knew it wasn’t really intended for that sort of thing, and the smile faded gradually to a kind of bemused sadness as I wrote “Matthew 7:15” on his chest.

  That was the last use I would have for the lipstick, and I was careful to smear any possible prints off the sides before dropping it into the trash.

  Getting him to take off his undershorts was even more difficult.

  He really didn’t want to, and for a moment I felt my control slipping. Neatness apparently wasn’t the only thing Mama had stressed.

  But there is balm in Gilead, and a physician, too: The plastic raincoat I offered him seemed to be just the amount of covering that modesty demanded, and reluctance melted away the moment it was in place.

  My erstwhile satellite was now ready for his grand debut.

  I risked a peek outside.

  Two elevators had come and gone since the one that had brought him to the observation deck, and one had already gone down while the other was about to shut its doors for an empty downward run when my hand intervened.

  Three sightseers were still on the observation deck, but they were deep into high-angle views and proper f-stops, so there was no one to see or remember as I ushered my blank-faced subject into the elevator and yanked the raincoat from his shoulders.

  “Bon voyage!” I said, and snapped my fingers to break the trance just as the doors closed automatically.

  The journey to the main lobby would be via express.

  No stops.

  And no place to hide on arrival . . .

  Sometimes I’m such a son of a bitch.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  For while the false teacher convinced of his own righteousness may pursue wealth or power, these are not his true goals.

  He seeks them only as a means to an end . . .

  TWELVE

  It was a rotten thing to do, and my conscience should have been giving me a fit as I headed for the airport later.

  But I had other things to occupy my mind.

  Starting with Angela Palermo. I had left her safe among friends, asleep in Margery’s spare bedroom at Best Licks. Angela had shown a lot of improvement in the few days since my arrival at Glen Ellen. No more ghostly voices in nearby rooms, no more raids on the wine rack. Not even a repetition of the hysterical Gideon-creed I’d heard more recently from Suleiman’s sister.

  All the same, it seemed a bit early to leave her alone in the house while I made an excursion to San Francisco. So, with Dr. Cates’s agreement, I’d put the trip off for a day in order to drive her to the mountains.

  I’d expected resistance. But I didn’t get any—and that worried me a little. Angela Gianelli Palermo was a grown woman, a widow and mother who had been running her own life, not to mention a going business of some size, for more than a decade. Being treated now like a nightmare-prone child should logically have prodded her in the pride. But her only response was a kind of acquiescent shrug.

  “Will we be gone long?”

  “I don’t think so. A day, maybe two or three if I have trouble making contact.

  “Then I guess I’ll need to pack a bag.”

  “Good idea.”

  But she made no move to do it until I asked if she had a spare suitcase on the premises. And after we’d fished one out of a back-bedroom closet, she still seemed to need advice about what to take.

  “Will it be cold?”

  “Maybe. At night.”

  “Then I guess I ought to have a sweater. Or a coat.”

  “And socks.”

  “Oh . . . yes.”

  There were probably chores to do and arrangements to make
before leaving the business and household unattended, but she couldn’t seem to think of any when I asked and I decided not to press the matter. She was asleep in the rented car’s passenger seat by the time we reached the main highway.

  And went on napping, with only occasional moments of cat-stretch wakefulness, throughout the trip.

  Dr. Cates had assured me this was normal.

  “She’s like anyone recovering from a series of shocks,” he said. “The organism has taken one hell of a beating. First the thing with Gideon, whatever it was, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know. Or want her thinking about it, either, unless one of us is a qualified psychiatrist. Add in the drinking, which I think must have been going on for quite a while, and you’ve got a mix that can be—still could be—lethal. Wine is one of the good things of the earth, but it gets to be nasty stuff in a hurry when you swill it down like water.”

  “What she’s got is just a kind of monumental hangover, then?”

  “That, and a whole fuse box full of blown emotional circuits. About what you’d get turning thirty thousand volts through a lamp cord.”

  “But it can be repaired.”

  “Maybe.”

  The doctor’s eyes were still friendly, but I could feel an undercurrent of curiosity, and a lingering trace of the emotional distance that comes with being a green monkey in a blue monkey tree. I had won conditional acceptance on the basis of a well-chosen phrase or two and an apparent willingness to assume responsibility. But that didn’t make me a member of the tribe. Or even necessarily human. I might yet turn out to be one of Them.

  It was a reservation I could understand—and even approve. But on the other hand, the hell with him.

  “How long?” I said.

  The doctor’s face told me he thought it was a stupid thing to ask.

  “How long till she can row her own boat?” he said. “Who the hell knows. A week. Or a month. Or a year.”

  “Or forever?”

  He nodded. “That, too. Especially if she gets the wrong kind of . . . help . . . right now.”